The College Fix

Title IX complaint says several of business school’s programs, scholarships discriminate against men 

A Northwestern University graduate program recently announced that 50 percent of its new students are women, leading to questions about whether the institution is prioritizing students’ gender over academic merit.

Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management also is the subject of a new Title IX complaint that claims several of its programs and scholarships discriminate against men.

This fall, the Kellogg School accepted 524 students into its two-year masters of business administration program, and 50 percent are women, according to a recent article on the school’s website.

This is the first class in the “program’s history to reach that milestone,” the article states.

The MBA students were “selected through a holistic admissions process that evaluates multiple factors,” according to the university.

The specific factors were not listed, but the article mentioned that students’ diverse experiences, academic excellence, and extracurricular activities played a part in their acceptance into the Evanston, Illinois university.

The post also listed a few of the demographic groups to which the graduate students belong, including “11% [who] identify as LGBTQ+” and “40% [who are] are international students.”

But Adam Kissel, a former U.S. Department of Education official, said Northwestern Kellogg’s emphasis on gender parity likely violates federal anti-discrimination law.

“If a business school has a gender parity target in admissions, that’s a quota on the basis of sex that is likely unlawful,” Kissel said in a recent email to The College Fix.

On Oct. 27, Kissel filed a Title IX complaint against the business school for “holding programs and activities that are limited on the basis of sex” and for “operating sex-restricted scholarships.”

The complaint, which was sent to the Illinois branch of the Office for Civil Rights, mentioned several Kellogg programs and scholarships that cater exclusively to women.

Northwestern’s media office did not respond to several requests for comment by email and phone over the past two weeks. The Fix asked about the Title IX complaint and its admissions and gender parity priorities.

According to Kissel’s complaint, shared with The Fix, Northwestern’s Women’s Director Development Program and its Women’s Senior Leadership Program are among the programs that restrict men from joining.

Another is Empowering Women through Poker, a program that uses the game “as a platform to help women explore and build crucial leadership abilities such as decision-making, negotiation and emotional intelligence in a creative and engaging way,” according to the school’s website.

In addition, Kellogg’s Drake Scholarship and Forté Foundation Scholarship are limited to female students, the complaint states.

Kissel also criticized Kellogg’s Women’s Business Association, an organization he says “actively excludes men from equal treatment and treats them differently as needing special education.”

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“Gender parity initiatives almost always seek to lift up women at the expense of men,” Kissel told The Fix.

They also encourage some “people to pursue studies they are not actually ready for” and “disrespect women’s choices by trying to get women to do things they do not already want to do, in order to achieve social goals.”

Policies that discriminate based on gender “risk findings of Title IX noncompliance that threaten all federal funding to the university,” Kissel said, directing The Fix to a U.S. Department of Justice resource.

The DOJ “Title IX Legal Manual” confirms Kissel’s statements, reporting that Congress gives funding agencies “the authority to implement Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination in educational programs or activities of recipients of federal financial assistance by issuing regulations.”

However, Kissel said it is unclear “whether Kellogg is using sex-based preferences in admissions” after the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

The decision, which condemned Harvard’s and UNC’s race-based admissions processes, deemed affirmative action a violation of the Equal Protection Clause included under the Fourteenth Amendment.

“Diversity by sex is a poor proxy for the actual viewpoint diversity that makes a college flourish,” Kissel told The Fix.

“Diversity initiatives for the sake of counting identity groups is more of a socialist redistribution exercise or a project in cultural division than a genuine effort to bring diverse views into academic discussion,” he said.

But it isn’t just Northwestern Kellogg that has embraced gender parity. In August, the California Institute of Technology also boasted that its current freshman class is 50 percent female, The Fix reported.

Ironically, Kissel said some higher education “institutions that have gender parity goals might be hard pressed to define what a woman is in the first place.”

The College Fix also reached out to Northwestern’s College Republicans group twice via email in the past two weeks for comment, but received no response.

MORE: Caltech boasts ‘diversity’ efforts result in 50 percent female class

IMAGE: Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management

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